The Taboo
For ten years, our industry has repeated the same mantra ad nauseam: “Let creators be free, they know their community better than you do!”
But what started as a genuine necessity in 2016 has become a dogma in 2026.
It is time to break the taboo.
Authenticity has become the shield word behind which the industry has filed away its lack of strategy. Because the data that has been piling up over the past twelve months tells a far less comfortable, but far more interesting, story: the more creative freedom we give creators, the less campaigns perform.
And the more creators there are in a campaign, the stronger this effect becomes.
I am not arguing for less creativity. I am arguing for the opposite: that creativity in influence becomes a craft again, with an idea, a framework and accountability, rather than a lottery.
Why now
Because the channel has changed in size, in nature and in expectations.
In size, first. In France, influencer marketing investment reached €587 million in 2025 according to ARPP and France Pub, up 13.1% in an advertising market that shrank by 1.3%. In three years, it has grown by 82%. Globally, the IAB estimates creator-economy advertising at $37 billion in 2025 and $44 billion in 2026. It is quite simply the fastest-growing advertising channel in terms of investment.
And the market has professionalised: 65% of national advertisers now go through an agency, compared with 37% in 2022. But it has professionalised its execution, not necessarily its thinking. The same study notes that 42% of advertisers still consider the lever “complex to implement”. They are right, but what is complex is neither the logistics nor the selection of creators…
In nature, next. Influence has evolved into creator marketing. We have moved from an organic campaign with one post and three stories to a fully fledged ecosystem: a creator's content still carries an organic campaign, but it also feeds a paid social set-up, becomes a PR angle, and is built through experiential.
The creator has moved to the centre of a 360° set-up. And a 360° set-up demands, by definition, what every 360° set-up has demanded for 100 years: strategic planning and creative direction. You cannot orchestrate five levers around a piece of content you haven't thought through. Nor around fifty pieces of content that don't tell the same story.
In expectations, finally. When a channel accounts for 5% of digital and grows faster than digital itself, marketing and finance departments stop settling for a view count and an engagement rate. They ask for what they ask of any mature channel: brand lift, econometrics and attribution.
And for the first time in the history of our channel, we have access to them: the IPA has compiled 220 econometric studies across 28 countries and £133 million of investment; WPP Media, System1 and TikTok have tested 1,217 creator ads against more than 350 brand lift studies; Billion Dollar Boy and DAIVID have measured attribution across 5,000 pieces of content.
Influence is finally being judged with instruments worthy of its new maturity.
All that remains is to read what they say.
Memory activated at the right moment: the only true arbiter of advertising effectiveness
As you know, an ad does not sell at the moment it is seen; it sells by making the brand easier to choose when the need arises.
WPP Media has quantified this across 1.2 million purchase journeys: 84% of purchases go to brands people were already leaning towards before they even started searching. The real advantage of advertising is memory.
The good news is that creator marketing obeys exactly the same rule! And when that rule is respected, it becomes the most effective channel in advertising.
This is exactly what the IPA study reveals. In the long term, influence shows the highest sales multiplier of all channels measured, ahead of television. System1's data confirms the mechanism: on average, ads delivered through creators generate 23% more brand recall than brand ads. As for the Effies, their recent study shows that creator marketing has the best brand-building / conversion ratio of any advertising channel.
Chart 1: The long-term multiplier of creators beats every other channel, TV included. Source: IPA Influencer Benchmarking, 2025.
The real question is: why doesn't it work every time?
What builds memory: emotion coupled with the brand that claims it
What makes a creator ad leave a trace? The Creator Effectiveness Playbook by WPP Media, System1 and TikTok tested every variable.
The verdict is striking: engagement rate explains 0.2% of brand recall. Zero point two. The best engagement metric, the comments-to-likes ratio, climbs to 11.3%.
Creative quality, for its part, explains 54.6% of recall.
Almost five times more than the best indicator on which the industry has built its campaign reports for 10 years.
So yes, this raises the thorny problem of measuring the effectiveness of an influencer campaign, but that will be the subject of a future article.
And this creative quality has two parts.
Emotion, first: an ad that makes you feel something forms a memory, and the stronger the emotion, the faster the memory forms. Indeed, the most emotional creator marketing campaigns generate more than twice the recall of the least emotional ones.
The brand, second: it needs to be recognisable early enough to claim that emotion. Otherwise the emotion exists, but the audience will attach it to the creator, to the joke, to the moment. As System1 puts it, an ad that isn't branded isn't an ad (in the negative sense of the term), whereas strong early branding triples recall.
Chart 2: Engagement rate, the king metric of influence for ten years, explains only 0.2% of brand recall. Source: The Creator Effectiveness Playbook, 2026.
Except that.
40% of creator advertising content contains no brand signal in the first two seconds, compared with 10% for brand ads. And according to WARC, only 27% of creator content is attributed to the right brand!
And delivering an emotion that is strong and clear enough across several (dozen) creators and several online and offline touchpoints is impossible without a deliberate creative strategy.
Chart 3: Whatever the size of the creator, nearly four out of ten ads neither show nor name the brand in the first two seconds. Source: The Creator Effectiveness Playbook, 2026.
Put all of this together and you get this result: only 29% of creator ads outperform the average brand ad!
Creator marketing today works like a venture capital fund. A few successes pay for all the failures, the campaign average is excellent, but nobody knows in advance which ones will win.
No marketing director would accept this from their TV strategy: buying ten spots hoping that two will work, without really knowing why.
The objective, then, is to shift the average: reduce the variance, make the channel predictable. And this is not a casting problem or a budget problem. It is a problem of how work is organised: who decides what, before the creator switches on the camera.
Two professions
Creators are professionals, often excellent ones, and the condescension they still endure from some advertisers is indefensible. Their expertise is real, especially when it is not a commercial collaboration.
Because that expertise is a creator's expertise on their community, on their platform, in their tone.
Yet understanding a brand's business problem, its category, its distinctive assets, the insights driving its brand platform, its purchase levers, its marketing plan including its TV campaign, its outdoor and its retail at the same time; choosing the human need to dramatise; prioritising the messages; deciding where and how the brand should appear in order to be remembered: that is another profession, that of a strategic planner and/or a creative strategist.
Neither superior nor inferior. But different.
And it is ours, that of agencies and advertisers. And it is up to us to own it instead of pretending it is theirs, calling “authenticity” what was mostly unfair delegation.
There is a difference in kind between a creator speaking to their community and a campaign that activates fifty of them.
A single creator is coherent by construction: one point of view, one audience, one voice. Fifty “free” creators are fifty points of view, fifty ways of telling the product story, fifty different decisions about the moment the brand appears, or doesn't. For each creator, their content is coherent. For the consumer who comes across five of them in a week, it is five pleasant pieces of content that don't add up. Coherence cannot emerge from the sum of fifty individual intentions.
It is decided beforehand, upstream, by people whose job it is.
And the ecosystemisation of influence, the shift to creator marketing, makes the problem worse. When influence was confined to organic feeds, fifty creative freedoms turned, at worst, into fifty different posts that were ineffective in aggregate. But when each piece of content is then amplified in paid, picked up in PR or seeded through experiential, an inconsistency no longer stays in the feed. It is amplified with media buy, projected in front of journalists, dissonant at an event. And what was a small, poor social campaign turns into the failure of an expensive 360° campaign.
At BeInfluence, we activated more than 2,000 creators in 2025, across more than 200 campaigns in some thirty countries. Some of them mobilise one hundred and fifty. Nobody can seriously argue that one hundred and fifty creative freedoms produce an idea; they produce one hundred and fifty pieces of content.
A strategic approach, a creative platform, a framework: that is what turns one hundred and fifty pieces of content into a campaign.
Nobody has ever made up for a lack of coherence with more freedom. The problem is that today the majority of campaigns end up in the left-hand bar of the chart below because of too much freedom given to creators… and therefore too much strategic and creative laziness (or weakness) on the part of agencies and advertisers.
Chart 4: Strategy sets the ceiling, the brief decides how high you get. Source: The Creator Effectiveness Playbook, 2026.
But less freedom does not mean more control
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not arguing for scripts polished to the second, for full-screen logos at the start of the video, for the return of “command & control”. The data is just as clear in the other direction: over-direction kills the emotion we came for. Too much on-screen text, a hammered call to action, a creator who feels watched: each time, the emotional response drops.
The same studies that condemn total freedom condemn total control. Billion Dollar Boy names the two dead ends: “post & pray” on one side, “command & control” on the other. The effective work happens in the middle, in framed freedom.
Chart 5: What brands add to reassure themselves is precisely what makes emotion drop. Source: The Creator Effectiveness Playbook, 2026.
That framework comes down to a simple division of roles. The brand and its agency decide on the insight, the human need to dramatise, the idea, the role of the product, the distinctive assets to bring to life, the way the brand will be seen and heard. The creator decides how to interpret the framed brief. The brief defines the feeling, the role of the product, the brand codes and the first few seconds; it does not choreograph the performance.
Whether the brand arrives in the first two seconds, as System1 recommends, or at the emotional peak, as Billion Dollar Boy shows, ultimately matters less than this: it is a decision, not an accident.
This has been our conviction from the start: offering creators a very tightly framed playground, but with the widest possible frame. The nuance is the whole craft.
Putting the church back at the centre of the village
That church is strategy and creative.
For ten years, influence was built apart from them, as a casting and logistics business: finding the right profiles, negotiating, delivering, reporting views. The channel has grown, it now outweighs some legacy media, it feeds paid, PR and events. It is time to give it what we give any channel of this size: a planner, a creative strategist and a creative director at the heart of the set-up, and performance measurement of what really matters.
Arguing for less creative freedom is in fact arguing for more creativity. Arguing for more framework is arguing for more respect.
Respect for creators, to whom we owe a real brief, a real idea to make their own and transparent compensation, rather than a “do what you want” that masks our laziness.
Respect for advertisers, who invest in the channel with the highest long-term multiplier on the market and deserve that we stop treating it like a game of Russian roulette whose risks we pretend not to know.
Respect for the craft, finally: creativity has never been the absence of constraints. It has always been the best of what we do within a frame.
The real rebellion today is no longer to let everyone be free.
It is to dare to have an idea, to hold it across fifty creators and to measure its effects properly.
Do we want creator marketing to be treated as a grown-up channel?
Then let's start by behaving like one.
